Update on the CS Principles Project by Owen Astrachan, Duke University, and Amy Briggs, Middlebury College, project leaders of CS Principles The Computer Science Principles project is a collaborative effort sponsored by the NSF and led by a group of Computer Science faculty working together with the College Board. Our goal is to design and teach a new introductory course in computer science that will attract a broader range of students to computer science. This course would serve as a new Advanced Placement (AP) course in addition to the current CS AP A. The course introduces the content, practices, thinking, and skills that are central to computing. The Big Ideas underlying the course design include Creativity, Abstraction, Data, Algorithms, Programming, the Internet, and the global impacts of computing. For more information, please see csprinciples.org. During spring 2011, we reached out to computer science educators for feedback and endorsement on the project. Approximately 120 college and university department chairs and faculty completed a lengthy survey on our draft curriculum framework. In a separate effort, approximately 80 department chairs or their designees sent letters of attestation to the College Board, signaling a level of endorsement that will provide great momentum as the project moves forward. Many thanks to those in the SIGCSE community who took the time to provide input and helped us improve our ongoing work. CS Principles was piloted at five colleges and universities during the 2010-11 academic year. During 2011-12 it will be piloted at 11 high schools that are partnered with a college or university to SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol. 43, No. 4 offer a CS Principles course. These schools are widely dispersed throughout the country. Is your school next? We will be expanding the project over the next few years and working in cooperation with the NSF CS10K and CE21 programs to bring the CS Principles curriculum to more schools and more students. Again, see csprinciples.org for more information, please keep the input coming, and stay tuned for more updates as the pilots and course development continue! Conference Update The 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education will be held February 29 - March 3, 2012 in Raleigh, NC, USA. You can still submit a poster or a proposal for a Birds of a Feather session. The deadline is Oct. 24, 2011. For more information see the conference web site: sigcse.org/sigcse2012/ and the Call for Participation: sigcse.org/sigcse2012/authors/index.php The 17th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology (ITiCSE) will be held in Haifa, Israel July 3-5, 2012. The call for papers has been issued: http://www.iticse12.org.il/htmls/page_771.a spx?c0=533&bsp=498 The deadline for papers, panels and working groups is Janury 13, 2012. The deadline for tips, techniques and courseware as well as posters is March 13, 2012. October 2011

/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/update-on-the-cs-principles-project-gGpTUVGKnG